Conference Review: 3rd IHC HerMA Conference

HerMA as a concept is both a conference and a
degree – it is the Masters
in Heritage Management, delivered jointly by the University of Kent and the
Athens University of Economics and Business, and it is an annual three-day
conference that is both an intrinsic part of the degree course and an
opportunity for international heritage management issues to be presented and
discussed. The conference is held in Elefsina, an industrial town just west of
Athens that will be a European
Capital of Culture in 2021.

The 2016 meeting was the 3rd
annual conference, with over 40 speakers presenting in a single series of
sessions. This is an excellent format for a conference on this scale – with no
parallel sessions, every delegate was able to hear every paper, and discussion
opportunities were good and well-engaged with.

While the conference is tied in to the
degree, and many current students and recent alumni were presenting, this was
more than just a student conference. It represented a safe space for
early-career professionals to develop their presentational skills (all the
papers were in English, which was a second language for most presenters).

The conference was also accompanied by side
events and workshops, making the most of Elefsina’s setting and urban weave to
engage participants in provocative art experiences and walks, thinking about
archaeology within the past and present environment and how the past and
present environment shapes encounters with and experiences of archaeological
remains – starting with the conference venue.

The HerMA conference is staged in Elefsina’s
splendidly atmospheric Old Olive Oil Soap Factory, a celebration of elegant
industrial decay in a building complex that was at its economic height in the
first half of the twentieth century, but which now functions as a cultural
event space.

Sat beside the harbour, this is one of a
string of former industrial sites along the town’s shoreline, the abandonment
of which combine to present Elefsina as a place that feels like its glory days
may be past now – but industry is still present and real, as immediately next
to the venue is a big, working cement factory and across the bay is one of
Greece’s largest oil refineries.

And furthermore, industry is not what
Elefsina has always been known for. Elefsina was once Eleusis, and the caves
below the rocky hill in the centre of the town are where Hades snatched
Persephone and abducted her into the underworld, trapped until she was duly
rescued by her dutiful mother Demeter. With Demeter conveniently being the
goddess of agriculture and fertility, the story nicely fits in with the annual
agricultural cycle, as Persephone’s life of light and growth is followed by
darkness and misery when she is confined in the underworld until she re-emerges
to bring the first spring. The story was then appropriated into Roman myth –
Persephone became Proserpina – and the visible archaeological site of Eleusis
is now principally constituted of structures to service Roman pilgrims to the
sanctuary. And when that era ended, with the Christianisation of Rome, Elefsina
was reborn again, as the church that now sits on that sacred rocky hill
continues to bluntly emphasise.

The conference was set out with five thematic
sessions, each with a keynote speaker followed by five or six short papers,
extending from landscape archaeology to community engagement by way of
repatriation, education and 3D digital tools, before the conference concluded
with a general session on managing heritage resources. Throughout, public
archaeology – in all of its many guises – was a common theoretical reference
point.

If ever a conference had a star, this one
did, and the star was Matthew
Bogdanos. And he is all the more remarkable a star for an archaeological
conference, as he is not an academic archaeologist; indeed, he wouldn’t call
himself an archaeologist – he is an Assistant District Attorney in Manhattan, a
boxing champion, and is the US Marine Corps Colonel who was sent to secure the
Iraq Museum in Baghdad after the city fell to the Americans in 2003 and the
looters broke in.

Since then he has devoted both his military
and legal capital to countering the trafficking of stolen, illicitly traded
antiquities, and to telling the story of how and why this is done. As the
author of The
Thieves of Baghdad, his presentation updated the audience on the ways, and
appalling scale, that antiquities from south-west Asia, Afghanistan and
elsewhere have been stolen and sold in the last decade – with dramatic
descriptions of events that he was part of, details of which he asked the
audience not to repeat in publication. So all this reviewer can say is that the
things Colonel Bogdanos talked about were revealing, important, and ultimately
uplifting as we learned specifics of how the fight – and it is a fight - against
illicit antiquities dealing can and does make a difference for the cultural
heritage of the world.

The subtitle of the conference, “Developing
Best Practices in Heritage Management”, could have been misinterpreted as
suggesting that this would have been a string of worthy, but managerial,
papers. But HerMA was much more than this; it was a conference that couldn’t
easily be categorised, but can be considered as one of a range of contemporary
academic workshop-events, like ICAHM
Tampere, presenting novel ways to deliver academic engagement. Its openness
felt in one part like TAG, its
international-ness and academic intimacy - with a small group of global delegates
hearing all the papers, and then discussion continuing around artistic
side-events – felt like a WAC
Inter-Congress. This contemporary model for conferences, where active
participant engagement is fostered rather than passive receipt of ‘learning’
sets out a positive and valuable way forward for archaeological practice and
academia to work and progress together.

Get link

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Email

Other Apps

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Just a couple of lines to welcome you to this new research journal devoted to Public Archaeology.“AP: Online Journal in Public Archaeology” is a brand new peer-reviewed journal devoted exclusively to Public Archaeology. Edited by JAS Arqueología S.L., it will be freely distributed online in order to ensure full access to the discussion and spread of a growing stream that is starting to settle into everyday archaeological practice, as it should. The definition of Public Archaeology is still too broad to even talk about a consensus on it. This call for papers is not going to be a place to discuss about that, but the aim of the journal is to be able to delve into every issue related to the field. The limit of the definition is slightly clear. Archaeology is generally understood as the study of past societies from their remains, and Public Archaeology is the study of the relations between this Archaeology and Society in every aspect of daily life (social, economic and political). We are ta…

By Chiara Zuanni (University of
Manchester) Last
month I had the opportunity to participate in the annual conference of the DGUF
(Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ur- und Frühgeschichte e.V. – German Association for
Pre- and Protohistory). This year’s theme focused on public archaeology and
aimed to explore the possibilities and consequences of public
involvement with the past. During the two days which comprised the academic programme, many different
aspects of community archaeology, citizen science, and archaeological
communication projects were explored.

On
Friday, Sylvia Crumbach unpacked the relationship between re-enactment groups
and textile archaeologists: she argued that while both develop a great
expertise in ancient clothing, it remains to be understood how museum
reconstruction and images affect re-enactment costumes, and vice versa. The
controversies raised by public approaches to archaeological work were
highlighted in the afternoon, by two papers discussing metal detecting. Joch…

The forum that could not wait for a year to happen. A very interesting reflection by Yannis Hamilakis, that will be our 'Points of You' for volume 4. What do you think? "Friends asked me to elaborate on my suggestion for an Occupy movement, not only for art museums and galleries but also archaeological museums, archaeological sites/projects and other culture/heritage institutions that rely on cheap, un-insured, non-unionised labour, or on sponsorship from corrupt corporations. We in archaeology, art and heritage domains have been for far too long, oblivious, tolerant, if not complicit to a regime of work and political economy which is not sustainable; they tell us about expansion, new markets, new wings for our museums, new museums elsewhere, mega-projects with hundreds of specialists which are going to last for a quarter of a century, and we think: great! Lots of jobs for us and others, more heritage, more culture, more archaeology, that’s good all round, right?